Psychological Skills to Develop Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence (EI) is a form of intelligence that describes the ability to understand and manage our emotions, as well as recognize and influence the emotions of others. It is a complex skillset and is composed of multiple factors, including:

• Self-awareness: An awareness of your emotions in the moment, how they influence your thoughts and actions, and how they influence others.
• Self-regulation: The ability to use your emotions to make effective and adaptive behavioral decisions
• Social awareness: Knowing how to recognize and interpret others’ nonverbal cues and identify what others are feeling.
• Relationship management: The ability to use our emotional awareness to develop social and emotional skills to help us in our relationships.

EI is especially valuable for children, as it lays the foundation for healthy relationships, effective learning, and emotional resilience. EI can help children (and also adults!) learn to recognize and manage their emotions as well as constructively cope with challenging feelings, such as frustration or disappointment. It can also help children learn empathy, enabling them to understand and relate to the feelings of friends, classmates, and family members, which is essential for building relationships, resolving conflicts, and problem-solving.
Although EI is a skill that one learns and develops throughout one’s life, certain psychological practices have been found to help cultivate all domains of emotional intelligence:

Skills for Self-Awareness

As mentioned above, self-awareness is the ability to notice our feelings and how they are affecting us and others in the present moment. Some skills that have been shown to help cultivate emotional intelligence include

• Mindfulness Meditation: Mindfulness is the practice of developing a present moment awareness, intentionality, and a nonjudgmental mindset. Multiple studies have found that regular mindfulness practices can increase self-awareness as well as emotional intelligence and subjective wellbeing overall.

• Journaling: Journaling about everyday experiences have been found to increase self-reflective abilities as well as increased feeling of self-esteem and competency. Taking a few minutes a day to reflect about your daily life, your successes, failures, goals, and feelings may help develop self-awareness and greater awareness of how you see yourself and the world around you.

• Ask for Feedback: One of the most difficult aspects of self-awareness is that you are unaware of all your blind spots, pet peeves, habits, and patterns. Consulting with good friends, family, or colleagues can help you better understand how you come across emotionally and behaviorally in certain situations. However, this activity is often best done when you are with a person whom you feel you can trust, and whom you can take perhaps upsetting or uncomfortable feedback from in a nondefensive way.

Skills for Self-Regulation

Self-regulation is the ability to effectively control and adapt your emotional responses to align with your values, goals, and the demands of a situation. No one may be able to perfectly regulate their emotions at any given time, but one can learn skills and techniques to better deal with them. Developing self-regulation skills often require practice and intentionality.

• Taking a Pause: When faced with an emotional trigger, take a moment to pause before responding. Although this sounds simple, it is often quite difficult. Strong emotions often make us feel like we need to respond immediately. Taking a moment to pause can give us valuable time to collect ourselves and put some distance between us and the feeling. Some ways to take a pause may be counting to 10, taking a few deep breaths, or even stepping away momentarily. This creates a gap between stimulus and response, allowing for thoughtful action rather than impulsive reaction.

• Recognize Emotional Patterns and Be Prepared: Pay attention to recurring triggers and your usual responses. Learn from the self-awareness techniques you practice, either from this article or elsewhere. From your journaling, have you noticed any situations where you consistently overreact or feel overwhelmed? From your feedback from friends, do they tell you when they can tell you are anxious or upset? Identifying these patterns helps you prepare and plan more effective responses. Being prepared can go a long way.

• Develop Healthy Routines and Habits: Keeping healthy routines can often help us cope with strong emotions. We are much worse at regulating emotions when sleep-deprived or hungry. Additionally, ensuring you engage in regular physical activity can reduce stress and improve your ability to handle emotions. Ensuring we are physically at the top of our game also helps us mentally and emotionally.

Social Awareness and Relationship Management Skills

Social awareness and relationship management can be challenging skills to learn. Learning them involves engaging with others interpersonally, which can be anxiety-inducing or frustrating. Although these are often separate skill sets, many practices, and exercises build up these skills. Below are some skills that can help build an awareness of how others think and feel.

• Active Listening: Active listening helps build social awareness and relationship management. It is helpful in various personal and professional roles and has positively increased wellbeing, relational harmony, and leadership ability. Active listening can allow you opportunities to practice understanding other’s thoughts and feelings, and gives you a tool to learn how to empathize with their experience. Although there are courses and training on active listening, the overall essence of this skill is giving your full attention to others, listening without interrupting, and responding thoughtfully. When using active listening, make sure to:

• • Maintain eye contact to show engagement.
  • Observe Nonverbal Cues. Notice the tone of voice the person uses, how they position their body, and their facial expressions.
  • Convey Nonverbal Cues. Similarly to monitoring your partner’s nonverbal cues, notice your own. Try to hold a relaxed posture and a warm tone, and nod along
  • Summarize what you hear. Before responding with your own perspective, confirm with your partner you understand what they are saying
  • Ask open-ended questions. Avoid simple ‘yes/no’ questions by asking in ways that give your partner multiple options to respond. For example, instead of saying, “Were you angry?” ask, “How did that make you feel?”

• Practice Empathy: Consciously considering how other people are feeling at the moment can help you build ‘empathy’ muscles. As people are talking, try to ask yourself what you think this person is feeling at that moment and how it might be affecting them. Are they happy, or more excited? Are they more angry or sad? How might that influence what they are saying or doing? If you are practicing this with a trustworthy or safe person, you could politely ask them what they are feeling at that moment. Building empathy helps you be aware of how other people understand the world and can also help you interact with them more effectively.

• Engage in Diverse Social Experiences: Interact with people from different cultures, backgrounds, and viewpoints to broaden your understanding of social dynamics. The more experience you get with difference, the more used you will be to it. This can help you feel more confident in your interactions with others in different situations.

All of these skills mentioned above can help build EI. However, if you wish to learn more about EI or work on it with professionals, psychotherapeutic services such as therapy can help build these skills in focused ways, drawing upon up-to-date psychological science. Additionally, there are many influencing factors and components that may affect EI. For example, issues related to ADHD and Autism have been found to affect EI in unique ways. Neuropsychological testing may help identify any developmental, psychological, or environmental factors affecting your ability to use EI. If you have any questions or would like to consult with a member of our team, please contact our clinic.